REGRESSIVE VOICE ASSIMILATION IN SWEDISH

This paper examines the occurrence of regressive voice assimilation in Swedish. Six speakers of Central Standard Swedish were recorded and the voicing conditions in stop-fricative and stop-stop clusters were analyzed. The findings indicate that regressive devoicing of lenis stops (/b d g/) occurs only when followed by /t/, but not /s/. This contradicts claims in the literature regarding the nature of regressive voice assimilation in Swedish. These findings also demonstrate the necessity of doing detailed acoustic analysis of stop production in order to ascertain the details of the phonological distribution of stop variants.